Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold

Tony Liang

University of British Columbia

October 3, 2024

Protein and their structure

  • Molecular element that …
  • Involved in every important activity that happens inside every living thing
  • Protein folding matters but hard to solve
  • We knew 3D structures for only about 17% of roughly 20000 proteins in the human body

How do we know protein structure?

Maybe spend some money and do some lab work?

Tedious experimental methods like

  • X-ray crystallography
  • cryo-electron microscopy
  • NMR spectroscopy
  • We mean multi-million dollars and months or even years

Thanks to magical AI

Alphafold

  • Fun story: Rise from a competition “Olympics for protein folding”
    • Given one dimensional amino acid sequence, can you predict the protein structure?
  • Artificial Intelligence tool that predicts protein structure from sequence.
  • Very well prediction to be within width about one atom
  • We know have ….

Future with Alphafold

  • I dont know